In this week’s blog, guest author Laura MacDonald shares her experience of doing a partnership PhD, working to develop a new archive as well as researching for her thesis.

An Archive Unlike Any Other

We’ve all heard horror stories about dreary, dusty, disorganised archives, full of papers which are difficult to access and use, gatekept by an unapproachable archivist, and so the gems almost certainly contained within go unseen because you can’t find them unless you already know what you want to find.

The Alasdair Gray Archive (AGA) bucks any expectations (read: fears) you may have about conducting research in an archive like that. The rooms and everything inside exude warmth and the desire to share knowledge with and spark creative thought in its visitors. The space itself is filled with art, drafts, and figurines from which the public, creatives, placement students, and anyone in between would struggle not to draw inspiration. Everything contained within these walls is as open and accessible as possible, after all, accessibility is imperative to any archive’s longevity. Archival spaces need to be inviting, and most importantly, the collections within must make sense to people with much less knowledge of the subject than the archivist.

In the last year, the AGA launched the first in its community of archives: The Agnes Owens Archive. These materials – a collection brimming with draft manuscripts of published and currently unpublished texts, photographs, correspondence, and newspaper clippings – were thoughtfully collected and donated last year by one of Agnes’s sons, John Crosbie, with the generous support of Agnes’s family.

I’ve had the incredible fortune to be one of the first people to work with these materials, by reorganising and listing their contents. The AGA is the industry partner in my SGSAH-funded CDA project, and so one of the project’s key aspects is to be part of setting up the AOA and helping ensure its usability.

Organising Agnes

It goes without saying that I’m a huge fan of Agnes Owens, given the topic of my PhD. It is a huge privilege to not only get to use these archival materials in my own research, but to also have a lot of say in the organisation of the collection.

My first task upon arrival at the archive back in October 2023 was the delightful undertaking of reading every single page. This preparatory work allowed me to understand what exactly we have in the collection and decide how best to organise it. It was no mean feat to match up many split-up pages of draft manuscripts, believe you me! Identifying texts by singular pages of early drafts, in which some of the characters and plots were very different from the published texts we recognise today, certainly put my knowledge of her entire oeuvre to the test. But it was incredibly satisfying to piece together these pages, fit them back into the drafts with which they belonged, and know that this reorganisation meant that the collection would be much more user-friendly for whoever will access it in the future.

It’s fairly unusual to disrupt the natural order of archived materials in this manner, but we felt that reorganising the papers, rather than leave them in the order in which they were donated – mixed up, quite possibly in the order in which they left Agnes’s house after her death – was essential. Following the model already employed in the reorganisation of Alasdair Gray’s work in the archive, the choice to rearrange the papers and order them by subject was made so that the collection is easier for everyone to understand, without the need for someone with extended knowledge of Agnes’s life and writings to talk them through what’s there.

I’ve opted for categorising the collection as materials relating to published works, unpublished works, and personal miscellany. Within this, materials are further divided by text or specific subject matter, and then ordered chronologically. Once this categorisation was decided, putting the papers into order involved a lot of crawling around on the (very clean! Let’s bear in mind proper preservation practises!) floor to slot everything into the numerous, meticulously labelled folders, as you can see in the photo below.

With help from Glasgow Museums, we then devised a new excel listing to catalogue everything in great detail. Assisted by Evie Glen, a lovely volunteer and undergraduate student at the University of Glasgow, we’re getting through all the papers, but currently the listing is still in progress.

Asserting Agnes’s Voice

Over the next few years, I’ll be working with the AOA on producing more materials – including oral history interviews with Agnes’s friends, family, and contemporaries – that will also be housed in the archive. It’s a real privilege as a PhD student to be on the practical side of this archive by not only reorganising and re-cataloguing the collection, but to also produce materials which will be archived alongside Agnes’s own work. Adding more materials to an archive helps to ensure its growth and longevity, and I’m delighted to be part of this for the AOA.

The Agnes Owens Archive will open in Autumn 2024. Do come and visit us! Enjoy reading unpublished works, see the beginnings of some of Agnes’s published texts, and notice how her writing process is made visible through her handwritten annotated drafts. Keep up to date with all that’s going on here by following @AOwensArchive on X (Twitter) and @agnesowensarchive on Instagram!

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